Political Handbags. the Representation of Women Politicians
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MEDIA@LSE Electronic MSc Dissertation Series Compiled by Professor Robin Mansell and Dr. Bart Cammaerts Political handbags. The representation of women politicians. A case study of the websites and newspaper coverage of the women candidates in the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election. Helena Markstedt, MSc in Politics and Communication Other disssertations of the series are available online here: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers/ Dissertation submitted to the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, September 2007, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MSc in Politics and Communication. Supervised by Dr. Maggie Scammell. Published by Media@lse, London School of Economics and Political Science ("LSE"), Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. The LSE is a School of the University of London. It is a Charity and is incorporated in England as a company limited by guarantee under the Companies Act (Reg number 70527). Copyright in editorial matter, LSE © 2007 Copyright, Helena Markstedt © 2007. The authors have asserted their moral rights. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. In the interests of providing a free flow of debate, views expressed in this dissertation are not necessarily those of the compilers or the LSE. MSc Dissertation Helena Markstedt Political handbags. The representation of women politicians. A case study of the websites and newspaper coverage of the women candidates in the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election. Helena Markstedt ABSTRACT Media’s representation of women politicians is seen as an one of the obstacles to achieving equal representation. Previous research has focused on comparisons between how men and women politicians are covered in media, but to what extent does women politicians themselves challenge the unfavourable media coverage? The increasing use of candidate websites makes a considerable amount of data available to research candidates’ self- presentation, but no previous research has used this resource to compare it with the media representation for the same candidates. This is what this dissertation sets out to do. The theoretical underpinning is provided by Yvonne Hirdman’s (1987, 1988, 1990) theories of the two logics of the gender system, differentiation and hierarchy, and Graham Murdock’s (1999) idea about how the different aspects of representation, in numbers and in image, are interconnected. The research model is based on a content analysis inspired by Bystrom, Kaid, Robertson and Banwart’s (2004) concept of webstyle (looking at the gender specifics of candidates websites) and newsstyle (looking at the gender specifics of media coverage). The research in this dissertation uses the case study of the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election in 2007 and examines similarities and differences between the website texts and newspaper coverage of the two women candidates, Hazel Blears and Harriet Harman. The findings show that there are few differences between the website texts and newspaper articles in terms of focus, but that the presentation of the candidates as individuals is often unfavourable in media. The conclusion indicates that the research model needs to be expanded to include interviews with politicians, advisors and journalists, and conduct a more qualitative discourse analysis. - 1 - MSc Dissertation Helena Markstedt 1. Introduction The cost of women politicians’ handbags became the subject of one of the more memorable debates in the media coverage of the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election in 2007. The debate started when Harriet Harman expressed concern about Britain becoming a ‘divided society’ “where many people struggle to make ends meet while others spend £10 000 on a handbag” (Brown, The Independent, 2nd June 2007). Hazel Blears, commented on this by saying that she did not think it is the job of politicians to tell people what they should spend their money on. This disagreement was followed by reports about the price of the handbags used by Blears, Harman and other women politicians. This is an illustrative example of how media focuses on things that make women politicians different from the dominant group - men, often in a way that does not reflect on the policy priorities of the women candidates and instead concentrates on their character and appearance. Despite the legal barriers for the political representation of women having been removed, British politics is still far from achieving equal representation of the genders.1 Previous research highlights how media representation is one of the important impediments for achieving parity (Braden, 1996; Bystrom et al., 2004; Dolan, 2004; Khan, 1996; Norris, 1997; Ross, 2002). Media spends less time describing policy priorities of female candidates and more time discussing viability, character traits and appearance than for male candidates (Khan 1996). In addition media describes men and women politicians’ policy interests and character traits differently (Bystrom et al. 2004). Karen Ross (1995) researched the media coverage of the Labour Party leadership election in 1994. These studies showed that Margaret Beckett, who was the only female suffered from systematically biased media coverage. As the incumbent Deputy Leader, and hence acting leader of the party after John Smith’s death, her candidacy was nevertheless seen as a hopeless case and the focus was on Tony Blair as the favourite and John Prescott as the challenger. In the Labour Leadership election 13 years later, the subject of this dissertation, the context is different. Women representation has improved in parliament and gender was a contested issue in the campaign. Additionally, personal campaign websites played an important role for the candidates as a way to present themselves. But has this changed the media coverage of women politicians? 1 Since the General Election in 2005, 19.8 percent of the members of the British House of Commons are women. (IDEA, 2006) - 2 - MSc Dissertation Helena Markstedt The rising importance of candidates’ websites gives researchers access to more data on how the candidates wish to present themselves. Research by Banwart (2002), Dolan (2004) and Niven and Zilber (2001) has compared women and men politicians’ websites. In this research there are expectations about how candidate websites could challenge the traditional media representation problem. Dolan writes that “employing websites gives candidates an almost unlimited ability to introduce themselves and their issue positions to voters” (Dolan 2005; 33). However, there has been no attempt in previous research to compare the self- presentation on websites with the media coverage of the same candidates, to analyse whether the self-presentation challenges or reflects the media representation. This is therefore the central question in this dissertation. The findings of the research in this dissertation indicate that the potential for self- presentation on websites might be overestimated; after all self-presentation reflects the same societal structures as media representation. The main focus of the majority of the website texts is campaign coverage rather than policy issues and policy areas associated with women are dominant in both the website texts and the newspaper articles. There are however differences between the websites and the newspaper articles when looking at how the candidates are presented as individuals, something which in the newspaper coverage often has a negative slant. The newspaper coverage also contributes to the differentiation of women and men by explicitly mentioning the candidates’ sex and grouping the two women candidates together and separating them from the male candidates, as shown by the handbag debate. - 3 - MSc Dissertation Helena Markstedt 2. Theory, previous research and background to the case “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (Simone de Beauvoir, 1949, p. 281) Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote highlights the underlying idea behind the theoretical assumption of this dissertation: women’s role in politics is restricted not by their biological sex but by their gender, constructed through the representation of women in the public discourse. If the aim is equal representation, it is of vital importance to analyse and understand how gender is represented in political communication. 2.1 Feminism and gender system Feminism can be defined as “those ideologies, activities and policies whose goal it is to remove discrimination against women and to break down male domination of society” (Dahlerup quoted in Lovenduski and Norris, 1996, p.4). The feminist movements have over time had different focus, such as the legal rights of women, economic and structural barriers, and more recently the everyday construction of gender in social relations (Baxter, 2003). This dissertation is theoretically grounded in the more recent feminist debate, identifying cultural representation and discourse as important carriers of the gender system. The gender system concept is central to feminist theory. Gayle Rubin coined the term sex/gender system and defines it as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual